Edinburg Scenic Wetlands

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Our fourth morning at the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival required us to be at the Harlingen Convention Center by 7 AM for the bus; we were glad it wasn’t earlier! There was an odd cloud or smoke plume that obscured the sunrise; tt was moving rapidly and seemed to have an origination point so I think it might have been smoke.

We headed to the town of Edinburg TX and their wetlands oasis – the Edinburg Scenic Wetlands & Birding Center - about 40 minutes on the bus.

I often revert to taking botanical pictures…and there were a lot of interesting plants ranging from dessert plants to lush riparian type plants.  Click on the image in the mosaic below to see a larger image.

I even enjoyed some artsy pictures!

There were quite a few birds: Black-bellied Whistling ducks (and a mixture of hybrid domestic/wild ducks/geese)

Northern Shoveler

American Wigeon (and a Ruddy duck)

American Avocet

Herons: Great, Snowy, Green

Ladder-backed Woodpecker and Inca Doves

House Sparrow near the feeders

Crested Caracara

Neotropical cormorant

Curved-billed thrasher

There were turtles in a lot of places too – even crawling up the dam abutment! There were Texas spiny softshell turtles on a concrete pad near the boardwalk.

 We weren’t still long enough to do much butterfly photography – but I did manage three!

The trip had been advertised as a place to see Kingfishers, but the banks where they had frequented had been cleaned up (i.e. bushy vegetation removed) and the Kingfishers had moved elsewhere.

National Butterfly Center

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Our second morning at the Rio Grand Valley Birding Festival started with a walk around the National Butterfly Center in Mission TX. It was a pleasant morning for a walk round the place. My husband and I stopped by the last time we went to festival in 2017, but it was a rainy and cold day….so we didn’t go past the visitor center! This time it was a beautiful sunny day, and we enjoyed walking around the space behind the visitor center with our guides. At one time there was a lot of anxiety that the border wall would cut through the center…but evidently the land for the center was preserved and there is still a lot to see there.

I saw a lot more than I was able to photograph! It was an interesting walk. I started with some plants near the entrance.

Scissor-tailed Flycatcher

Spiny lizards

Neotropic Cormorants in flight

Northern Mockingbird

Green Jay (including an interaction with red-winged blackbird)

Bronzed Cowbird

Plain Chachalaca

Great-tailed grackle (including a picture that makes it easy to see the size difference between the grackle and the chachalaca)

White-winged Dove

Black-crested Titmouse

Inca Dove

Hummingbird

Queen butterflies

A rescued tortoise (not native…shell damaged by a fire)

Logs with beer, banana, brown sugar mix painted on daily) that attract insects

Olive sparrow (I saw several during the festival but these were the only photos!)

Nest of an Altamira/Audubon oriole hybrid

An adult and juvenile white ibis flying

By the end of the walk, I was ready for a rest on the bus while we headed to another birding hotspot.

Quinta Mazatlan in McAllen

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After our Rio Grande Pontoon adventure, we boarded our bus to head toward Quinta Mazatlán, a park that is a birding hotspot in McAllen TX. The park is expanding and there is construction associated with that; a car had to be moved to allow our bus to pass through the reduced parking lot!

The only bird photograph I took was an Inca Dove high in a tree!

There were insects – a praying mantis, a moth, a butterfly.

The pods of Texas Ebony…palm fans…trees blooming in November – looking at plants we don’t have in Missouri.

Lichen looks about the same everywhere!

Looking back at my pictures – or lack of pictures – I realized I must have been tired and just focusing on keeping up with the group!

Next time we are in the area, Quinta Mazatlán might be I place I would like to go on our own…taking our time to see things and looking at the restored adobe hacienda that is there. The expansion should be finished by then!